Forget Politics, Remember Heroes

May 28, 1988|By Anna Quindlen

One of the things I like most about our neighborhood is the parades. They're good old-fashioned small-town parades, with fire engines and police cars and high-school cheerleaders carrying their pompons and kicking their legs in the air.

Every year the man who lives across the street from us marches, too. He's the one who hangs the flag from his apartment window and who has a bad leg that drags half a pace behind when he walks.

It's getting time to explain to my children what parades like this are for, and so I suppose it's time to try to explain it to myself. They're war parades, for the most part, or peace parades, if you look at it a different way, although when I'm staring at all the guns the soldiers carry, it's sometimes hard for me to look at it that way.

The one this week is for Memorial Day; then come Independence Day and Veterans Day. I don't recall ever going to a parade on Labor Day, perhaps because the old soldiers marched in that one, too, with their flags and badges. As the years passed, there were fewer and fewer soldiers, until now their numbers have been overwhelmed by the high-school trumpet players and drummers.

We were the minority, once, when we were children. Everyone had had a war but us. There were dog tags in the bedroom dressers, beneath the underwear. Some of our grandfathers still called Germans ''the Hun,'' as if all of them were one big bad guy. Some of our parents had gotten married fast; he spent his leave at the bachelor party and the reception, and she spent her honeymoon writing letters, still somewhere in a shoe box, on air mail envelopes as light as an illusion neckline.

But those things were simply memories by the time we were born, peacetime babies, millions of us. Eventually, we too had our war, although it was a while before we really knew about it, or called it that. The difference was that we wound up with no stories and songs for public consumption. No Iwo Jima, no ''Long Way to Tipperary.'' The guys in Vietnam listened to Jimi Hendrix and the Doors, which don't translate well to march time. And one day, on television, men in suits simply said the war was over.

So, we grew up feeling differently from our parents about the wisdom of the nation's going into battle. ''War is not healthy for children and other living things,'' said the ubiquitous, simplistic poster in our dorm rooms. Yeah, said the dads, the moms silent at their shoulders, but it sure beats the occupation of Mobile or Seattle by a bunch of people we hadn't met and didn't like, who couldn't even speak English. The world needed safekeeping from communism, they said. Maybe communism works better for some people, we replied. Remember those conversations, when war broke out at the dinner table?

I suppose what it came down to was that what our parents saw as patriotism, we saw only as politics.

The old turf battles are, to some extent, over now. The Japanese have taken over our electronics stores and auto showrooms, and we are building McDonald's within spitting distance of Red Square. We have met the enemy -- in hotels, restaurants, board rooms; on their home ground and on our own -- and we have exchanged business cards.

It's a small world after all.

And still we have our parades with people standing along the curb to cheer. And the old veterans are proud, because once upon a time they were part of something bigger than they were; something that was not about punching the clock or getting a good night's sleep, but about principles as noble as freedom and independence. And the young veterans, who just started marching a couple of years ago, are happy, too, because finally someone admits they exist.

Then I hear some old-timer on the sidelines shout, ''We should have stayed in and beaten the bastards!'' and the old differences boil up inside me again. I know there are some things worth dying for; I just don't like anyone telling me what they are. So I tell the children: This is about brave men and women who died for their country; who believed, as I do, but perhaps in a different way, that there's no place like home.